


Burnt Plastic (and Other Bad Ideas)

by More_of_This



Series: Don't Ask, Don't Tell [2]
Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan, The Trials of Apollo - Rick Riordan
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Don't Try This At Home, M/M, Nico and Leo are idiots, Nico is less of a psycho than Will initially thought, There is A Raccoon, Underage Drinking, Will has a point, Will is scared, Will-centric, fire safety is important, for americans, rated T for strong language, seriously, small mention of blood in the form of a blood pact
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-18
Updated: 2020-10-08
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:01:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26534020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/More_of_This/pseuds/More_of_This
Summary: Nico di Angelo and fire don't mix. Here's why.OR the one in which Will meets his neighbours, the fire alarm doesn't go off and somehow everything turns out to be alright by the grace of some miracle.He doesn't know yet that this is the start of the wildest friendship of his life.(This is technically part 2 in a series of short stories but it can be read as a stand-alone.)
Relationships: Nico di Angelo/Will Solace
Series: Don't Ask, Don't Tell [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1929433
Comments: 53
Kudos: 125





	1. The Kitchen Incident

**Author's Note:**

> Please for the love of God don't randomly set things on fire or disable smoke alarms, Nico and Leo in this story are setting a very bad example that should not be followed.  
> TW for mentions of blood and pricking with a needle, after the page break, so if you feel uncomfortable with that, I advise you don't read it.

“Hi, my name is Nico di Angelo, and I _majorly_ fucked up. Please help.”

As far as first impressions went, Will had to admit that this one was spectacularly bad. He looked at the guy standing in front of him in silence for a few moments. Long enough to register wide brown eyes, messy black hair pulled back in a tiny pony tail and a rose pattern peeking out from under the hem of a black shirt, probably extending down over the rest of his clavicle and pectoral. He was minutely impressed by the sight of him.

Then the smell of burning rubber hit him and it nearly made him gag.

“Did somebody burn a shoe somewhere?” he asked, covering his nose and mouth with his hand. It didn’t help.

“Plastic bottle, not important, do you know how to put out a mildly out of hand sink fire?” the guy — Nico di Angelo — said frantically.

Will just stared. Then the reality of what he’d just been told dawned on him and Will looked left at the kitchen to see suspicious amounts of smoke coming out the door.

“You set the _kitchen_ on fire?” he yelled hoarse with panic because well, _his room was right next to the kitchen_. That looked like it was _on fire_.

“Not the kitchen, the sink, didn’t you hear what I just said?” Nico snapped his fingers in front of Will’s nose like he was the idiot in this situation. “Can you put it out?”

“Why is the fire alarm not going off?” he said when his senses returned to him again. Will was suddenly fully alert, the emergency medic switch had been flipped. There was a crisis going on. If they didn’t get that fire under control things could get ugly. Right now was not a time to panic. There would be plenty of room for that later, when they weren’t in immediate danger of choking on toxic fumes or burning to death.

“We disabled it,” Nico said. He seemed to at least think that honesty was the best policy which saved the both of them a lot of effort. “It’s twitchy and I already got a write-up for smoking out the window the other week so we didn’t want to risk it.”

Will took a deep breath, regretted it immediately and coughed for a good half minute. “When this is over and we haven’t perished I’m going to strangle you with my bare hands,” he said darkly. Nico di Angelo nodded and dashed off to the kitchen, Will hot on his heels.

The damage was, surprisingly, not as bad as he expected. Like Nico had already told him there was just a small fire in the sink. The smoke was pretty terrible though so they really needed to get this sorted out as fast as possible because breathing burning plastic was definitely a no no when it came to health and safety.

“Fire extinguisher?” he asked, breathing into the crook of his elbow to at least have the feeling that he was minimising the intake of smoke.

“Oh genius yeah, love me a fire extinguisher, I’m a pro with fire extinguishers, quite unfortunate that there aren’t any around.”

There was another person in the kitchen, which Will should have expected considering the fact that Nico said ‘we’ when he was talking about disabling the fire alarm. Which, might Will add, was probably the stupidest thing he’d heard anybody ever do but here they were and he was looking at a plastic bottle burning in the sink so maybe it wasn’t.

“Smother it,” was his second reaction. It was a reasonably small, contained fire. He looked at the wall next to the fridge and saw the red casing there. Bingo. Fire blanket. He just hoped that it would be able to cover the edges of the sink properly and cut off oxygen supply because otherwise it wouldn’t do them any good.

“Smother it how?” second guy asked. He seemed a lot calmer about the whole ordeal than Nico, who was currently holding his head and repeatedly muttering ‘fuck’ like it was the best mantra in the whole universe.

He didn’t reply but just pulled the two strips down and unfolded the white fabric by flapping it down, far enough from the fire.

“Get back,” Will said, praying that he could remember how this went. He had learned at some point in his summer camp career how to use fire blankets but that was at least two years ago so he wasn’t entirely sure if he wasn’t going to straight up get himself a ticket to hospital.

Both guys moved out of the way like meek sheep, obviously completely okay with letting Will take charge of this clusterfuck of a situation.

“If I need a trip to the ER you’re paying for my medical bill,” he said, holding out his arms to shield himself from the heat coming off of the burning plastic bottle, one of the strips in each hand, edges of the blanket folded over them like he’d been taught in one long ago introduction course.

“I’ll pay your tuition cost for all I care just put out the damn fire,” Nico said, still panicking but somehow sounding calm enough to give Will the impression that he actually meant it, which Will didn’t know what to feel about. Before he could chicken out though, he stepped over to the burning sink and calmly draped the fire blanket over it, adjusting so that it covered the entirety of the fire and didn’t leave room on the bottom for air to still get in.

It wasn’t until he let go and took a step back that he realised he was shaking from head to toe. He dropped down in one of the rickety chairs ringing an even more rickety table and took a few very deep steadying breaths. It took him a good minute to get over the fact that this was probably the closest he’d ever been to death and that was also very much alright with him.

“Don’t remove that for at least half an hour,” he said when he had somewhat regained his bearings, pointing a still mildly trembling hand at the sink covered in white fabric. “And explain.”

The two guys looked at each other and had a silent conversation. Apparently the conclusion of it was that they might as well tell him the truth since he’d just saved their asses.

“So here’s the thing,” Nico started but then immediately stranded in his explanation maybe because there was just no way in which he could make it sound like this wasn’t the desperate act of a madman. He pushed his tongue into his cheek while looking at the ceiling in what Will assumed was thought but then he just seemed to give up, shook his head and looked at the other guy to let him explain what had lead the three of them here.

“Nico said that you can’t set plastic on fire,” the other guy said. Will took a good look at him. He was, well, short, first and foremost, with curly hair and perfect white teeth that were currently very visible due to the wide grin he was showing. “Naturally I had to tell him that you can in fact set plastic on fire, so we took a bottle, stuffed it full of dry leaves and dropped a match inside.”

He explained it like it was the most normal thing in the world and Will was perturbed because, uh, there had been an actual fire. In case anybody had forgotten about that already.

“Why would anybody of sound mind do that?” he said, more to himself than to the two people still in front of him.

“Well that’s easy,” Nico di Angelo quipped. He had decided that opening a window was now the best course of action to let out the smoke. “He’s not.”

Opening a window in case of a fire is the opposite of what you should do, Will remembered from that same fire safety introduction class but he couldn’t see any open flames anymore so he decided that maybe it wasn’t the worst thing to do since their surroundings were blanketed by a white fog and he was pretty sure it was starting to give him a headache.

“So uh,” the guy who still hadn’t been introduced said, scratching the back of his head. “How are we going to explain this? Because like I’m pretty sure we don’t have half an hour before Annabeth marches in here asking for an explanation.”

“Coming out here was the biggest mistake of my life,” was Will’s immediate answer. Nico looked at him like he agreed but he didn’t say anything. “Any plans on how to get out of what will most definitely end up being a situation that will have us kicked out of the dorms if not suspended?”

For the first time in his life, Will understood what people meant when they said the silence was deafening.

That was when the footsteps started echoing from the staircase.

“Fuck somebody’s coming,” Nico cursed and Will was beginning to get the impression that this guy cursed _a lot_ but he filed it away as completely irrelevant. He looked around the room like a deer in headlights and then landed on the toaster. The terrible, half-broken toaster. Will could see the idea forming in his head in real time.

“Leo can you fuck up the toaster?” Nico asked and at least now Will knew what the other menace was called before Nico pointed at him and told him to watch the door. He gingerly lifted the fire blanket. Will wanted to scream at him that that was exactly what you shouldn’t do but the footsteps were indeed coming up so he decided against screaming for the time being.

The fire appeared to be out. Leo pulled a screwdriver out of his pocket and started doing some voodoo on the toaster while Nico removed the fire blanket entirely and turned on the tap for a few seconds which caused another mushroom of smoke.

“Guys,” Will said urgently when he saw the door to the stairway open. The plastic bottle was thrown out of the window just as a flame the size of a butter knife sparked from the electric outlet.

“You’re a genius!” Nico practically sang and he grabbed Leo’s head and kissed him straight on the lips. Leo shoved him away and made retching sounds.

“All due respect di Angelo but don’t you ever do that again,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Pinky promise,” Nico said with a grimace of his own as if he couldn’t believe what he’d just done. Will almost hated to be the one to break up their lovely moment but he felt like he had to.

“Guys maybe figure out your lovers’ spat when there isn’t a fire.”

“This isn’t a lovers’ spat ew I would never date him,” Leo cried indignantly.

Nico just said “Oh, right,” and threw the fire blanket over the toaster like he’d seen Will do to the sink.

“What the hell is going on here?”

Oops. He’d forgotten about guard duty.

“Uh,” Will said eloquently. He glanced at the other two but they didn’t look like they were going to come up with any brilliant explanations.

Travis Stoll, their RA, took a long moment to take in the exact scene in front of him and Will would have paid actual money to know what he made of it because his face gave nothing away.

“There was a fire,” Will said, the first to recover. “The toaster was on fire, I think it’s because Cecil keeps pulling the chord out so violently, must have caused a problem with the contact or something? Yeah, so, I was just passing by, these two seemed to have it under control when I got here.”

Travis didn’t look like he was buying his explanation but he did seem willing enough to believe that Will was an innocent bystander.

“There’s a smoke alarm right there,” he said, pointing at the disassembled thing on the counter. “Care to explain why it didn’t go off?”

Leo seemed to suddenly find the cracks in the ceiling riveting while Nico picked at his nailbeds.

“Valdez?” Travis asked Leo point-blank. Leo made a choking noise. Travis shook his head. “Di Angelo? Do you have an explanation?”

Weirdly enough he looked more amused at the two than actually mad. Will thanked the heavens that it had been Travis that had walked in on them and not Annabeth or they would all have been in a load of trouble.

Nico looked at him from under his bangs and pursed his lips.

“If I tell you that I solemnly swear to not smoke in the kitchen again and buy a new toaster are you willing to let this go?”

The right answer should have been no but apparently Travis wasn’t in the mood for paperwork because he looked at the damage once more and shrugged.

“Cover all the damages to the counter and we have a deal.”

“I’ll pay to have this whole kitchen remodeled,” Nico said casually. “If it means you keep this off my record.”

Part of Will hoped that Travis was going to be responsible and put his foot down but he just grinned at Nico and mimicked zipping up his lips before casually walking away.

“Cool,” Nico said.

Will walked out of there feeling like he’d aged three years and simultaneously lost like ten years of his total lifespan from the sheer terror that he’d felt for the whole twenty minutes he’d spent in the kitchen.

________________

And he really thought (and hoped, and prayed) that that would have been the end of it and he never had to see the two weirdos again. Or at least not from less than a five meter distance since unfortunately the fact he ran in to them meant that they lived on the same floor.

He’d explained to Cecil why Annabeth had come up to him the next day to lecture him on how to properly pull an electrical cord out of a wall socket and they’d laughed about it after Cecil got over being mildly pissed for taking the blame, even if it was generally accepted that it had been an accident and in the end nobody got punished.

Then there was a knock on his door on Friday afternoon and when he opened the door he saw the two people from his nightmares standing in the hallway in front of his dorm room. He did what any sensible person would have done: he closed the door in their faces and said “No.”

Nico di Angelo was faster, though, and shoved his foot between the door before he could lock them out.

“We’re just here to talk,” he said, forcing his way inside like he did this all the time and that was just a little bit scary. There was a rolled up piece of what looked like parchment in his hand and it distracted Will enough for Leo to slip under his arm as well.

“Close the door,” Nico said, like that hadn’t been what Will had tried to do before he’d stopped him. Will, for some strange reason, listened to him and closed the door.

He looked at the two intruders warily. Leo had already made himself comfortable on his bed and Nico was busy rolling out the odd paper on his desk.

“So, as you probably know, the thing you witnessed the other day should not be discussed with anybody who wasn’t there,” Nico said. Suddenly he sounded all serious and almost ceremonial and Will got a bad feeling. Call it a premonition. He wasn’t going to mention that he’d already informed Cecil of everything because he had some mercy. Poor Cecil didn’t deserve to be dragged into it as well. “Therefore,” (Will silently wondered who in the blazes even used the word therefore in actual speech) “Leo and I decided the safest thing to do was if we just signed a pact of silence.”

Nico looked at him expectantly. Will came closer and looked at the paper on his desk. It did turn out to be actual parchment. The text itself was pretty straight-forward. Under no circumstances ever talk about what happened in the kitchen on 13 September 2017 or may I be struck by lightning yada yada and underneath it were signed two names in-

“Is that _blood_?” he screeched. There it was. Actual screeching. This was what those two had reduced him to.

“Don’t tell me you’ve never had a boyhood dream of signing a blood pact with somebody,” Nico said matter-of-factly. Leo nodded sagely.

“It’s pretty cool.”

Will looked at the two of them with a frankly horrified expression on his face.

“You’re kidding, right?” he asked.

Nico handed him a clean needle that was still in its sterile wrapping and Will really didn’t want to think about how he got it because Nico combined with sharp objects sounded like a terrible idea.

“Leo did it,” he said with a completely blank face. “I did it. You do it.”

He could imagine pretty well how all the blood left his face. “Seriously?” he asked, voice faint.

“You’re pre-med Solace this really shouldn’t scare you,” Nico said. “Just stab your finger and sign.”

Will looked from the one to the other very slowly about a hundred times but they both just stared back, stone-faced with their arms crossed. He didn’t want to think about how Nico had figured out that he was pre-med. He just didn’t want to think about this at all. He wanted to not be there and regretted every choice in his life that had brought him to this point.

“Okay what the fuck,” he whispered, tearing the plastic off the hypodermic needle. He poised it over his left pointer finger for a few unsteady breaths. If he just got this over with, they would probably leave faster. 

“You want me to do it for you?” Nico asked when he didn’t move for a very long time.

The fear of Nico stabbing a needle straight through his hand was enough to drive him to action. He swiftly brought it down like he’d practiced enough times in class. Like a blood sugar prick. Swift and clean and Will decided that while this was not the worst thing in the world he really didn’t want to have diabetes because imagine doing this every day multiple times that would be terribly annoying.

Leo nodded curtly, Nico inclined his head to the side. Will signed a very crooked version of his full name under the disturbingly terrible Gothic-themed silence pact in his own blood.

When he was done Nico picked up the paper and blew on the words to dry them before rolling it up into a tight cylinder.

“There we go, now that wasn’t so hard was it?” he said, smile breaking out on his features.

Will still looked at the two freshmen with eyes that felt like they were going to pop out of their sockets very soon.

“You guys are a fucking nightmare.”

Needless to say he didn’t use the kitchen again for at least a week and avoided the common area like the plague.


	2. Trash Panda

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It gets better before it gets worse. Will almost longs for the fire again. But mostly he just needs a nap, and apparently Nico isn't so bad after all. (Though he's still pretty bad.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this was completely unplanned and I haven't exactly thought this through as much as I would like you to believe, but I got into a conversation with @alltheglowingeyes earlier today and well... I like a challenge. And my creativity peaked. So now this is a thing.  
> I did promise no Wills would be harmed in the process. I never said anything about jeans or textbooks however.  
> (Also it's like 3:30 so if this sucks I take no responisbility)

It turned out that avoiding people was not that hard, even when they lived next door. Will didn’t see more of Nico di Angelo’s than his distant form leaned against the side of their building smoking his lungs black like a bad boy that was seriously tired of living, or his back turning the corner into the stairwell for the next couple of weeks. It seemed to turn out that they didn’t operate on the same schedule, oftentimes Will would come back home to find Nico leaving. He saw even less of Leo and to be fair that was fine with him. 

  
He’d come to the conclusion that Nico was crazy in the sense that he didn’t stop Leo from doing stupid things. Will could deal with a Nico. He’d dealt with plenty of Nicos before. In a sense Nico actually reminded him of Cecil. He wasn’t yet sure if that was a good or a bad thing but in the grand scheme of things he supposed it didn’t even matter because he wasn’t going to voluntarily start a conversation with the guy after he’d made him take a blood oath because that was just a very hard line of crazy in his friends that Will was not willing to cross. 

  
Leo, however, unnerved him because there was just so much chaotic energy radiating out of his little Latino body that Will was sure he never wanted to tangle with him again. 

So of course the universe conspired against him. 

  
Six weeks. He’d been given six weeks of respite. That’s when he came home one day and something flew at him and attacked him like it wanted to eat him for dinner.

  
The scream he let out was not his finest moment. He would like to defend himself by saying that there was something of unknown origin biting his leg. He thanked his lucky stars that it was nearing winter and he wasn’t wearing shorts because that could probably have ended up a lot uglier than it did.

  
That’s when he heard footsteps at the top of the stairs and a shout that he really should have expected. 

  
“Leo!” Nico shouted from two flights above him, leaning over the railing “I found your stupid fucking trash panda.”

  
_Trash panda._ That was the only thing his mind found important at that point apparently, because it echoed in his head with the weirdest ring to it. The thing that had bitten a hole in his favourite jeans slunk back and positioned itself on the stairs in front of him, blocking Will’s one and only route to the bed he so desperately needed at that moment. 

  
It was a raccoon. A very, very unhappy raccoon. 

  
He blinked. Surely this couldn’t be real.

  
Surely this was just his sleep deprived, stress-addled brain coming up with the worst kind of hallucination it could imagine but then that logic cracked because this situation was so far out there that there was simply no way he could imagine this. He didn’t have enough fantasy to make up a raccoon slinking through his dorm.

  
Nico appeared around the corned of the stairs and wow did Will suddenly feel a lot better about himself. He may have ripped trousers, but Nico had ripped everything. Which included his face and forearms. 

  
“Leo wants to keep it,” he said, out of breath from running down two flights of stairs. “Open the goddamn door so the thing can run off before he gets here because I want it out of here.”

  
And those were the first sensible words Will heard come out of that mouth admittedly quite pretty mouth. Unfortunately it wasn’t until the raccoon was well and safely out the door that he realised torn jeans were not the worst of his problems.

Because Nico di Angelo started apologising. And if that wasn’t a sign of the apocalypse then Will didn’t know what was. 

  
“Look I told him to leave the stupid thing, I’m sorry Will,” he said, sitting down on the stairs and looking as frustrated and tired as Will was feeling. 

  
“It’s fine,” he said, eager to get out of the situation and just take a three-day nap to get over the shock of being attacked by a raccoon. “It’s just jeans, I have plenty of them, it’s fine. You on the other hand should check your last rabies shot or you might be in for a world of pain.”

  
“No,” Nico said. “It’s not just your jeans.”

  
Uh oh. He raked a hand through his hair, which was about chin length when it wasn’t tied together and Will had to remind himself that that was completely irrelevant information. 

  
“Just-” he said, looking more uncomfortable than he had when he was trying to explain to Travis Stoll why the entire kitchen was smoking and it set off the worst kind of alarm bells. “Come upstairs, you’ll want to see this.”

  
Will was convinced he didn’t want to see it but he followed Nico up the stairs anyway. 

  
He turned out to be right. 

  
Will really didn’t want to see it. It was an absolute mess. 

  
His room was an absolute mess. Because somehow, the _trash panda_ as Nico had so eloquently called it had managed to make it inside and it had torn the whole place up. 

  
Well, his desk, mostly, and Connor’s bed. The rest of the room was messy but okay. Somehow Will wished that it had been his bed and Connor’s desk because he could’ve replaced some bedsheets. He could have easily gotten some new pillows. In the worst case scenario he even could have asked administration if he could get his mattress replaced. All of that would have cost him less than having his anatomy coursebook destroyed. 

  
“No,” he muttered, rifling through the mess of shredded papers and textbooks. The papers were fine, he could print out the assignments again. He could email his professors for course materials because he was sure the pictures he could take of this mess would have been enough for them to believe he wasn’t kidding when he pleaded a rabid raccoon attack. But the textbooks were not that easy to replace. 

  
“Oh my god no,” he repeated, finding that it wasn’t just his anatomy textbook that had been gnawed on and shredded. Three. Three of his textbooks were messed up beyond proper use. They’d cost him seventy dollars at least, and he’d gotten good deals on them, second hand in good condition. Now they were animal chew and he pulled at his hair and threw a fit like he hadn’t since graduating middle school. 

  
“Hey,” Nico said awkwardly when he’d already gone through his entire array of curses twice. “It’s alright. They’re just books. You can replace them. At least your notes are alright, right?”

  
Will had momentarily forgotten that he was even there but now he turned on him with an amount of fury that was simply not fair. The raccoon had clearly not been Nico’s idea, considering the fact that he’d practically kicked the thing out the door. If anything he’d gotten the worst end of it. The scratches on his face looked nasty and really needed to be checked out by a medical professional. But Will was pissed and Nico was there so he would have to suck it up and take the brunt of his anger in Leo’s stead.

  
He raised his ruined copy of an anatomy atlas in Nico’s face.

  
“This thing,” Will said, as calm as he could muster. “Cost me ninety dollars. And it’s a secondhand copy.”

  
“Okay.” 

  
Nico didn’t look like he was seeing Will’s point and that just drove him even more crazy. 

  
“Okay, I don’t know where I’m going to pull oh, you know, a hundred and fifty dollars from!” he was near hysterics. Ironically, he was probably feeling the same way Nico must have been feeling when he’d set the sink on fire. How the roles had reversed. Except, you know, Nico had caused his own crisis and Will had gotten dragged into it without ever being asked. 

  
“Hey, it’s alright, okay, we’ll figure something out,” Nico tried to calm him down, one hand clumsily coming up to pat Will on the shoulder. He brushed it off and slumped on his bed. 

  
“Do me a favour and just get out of here,” he mumbled. The book dropped from his hands onto the floor but he really couldn’t care any less. He was tired and drained and he’d barely recovered from his last crisis and now he was treated to another. He needed sleep. He needed to be left alone. He didn’t have the mental capacity to deal with this right now. “Please,” he tacked on, pathetically. 

  
“Okay,” Nico whispered. He closed the door behind himself with a quiet click. 

  
Will kicked his shoes off and dropped dead into bed. He figured things would be better after a nap.”

* * *

  
When he woke up, Connor was back and most of the mess had already been cleaned up, which he was infinitely grateful for.   
“Hey,” he mumbled at him. Connor replied with a hey of his own. Will looked at the clock. It was a little over ten, which meant he’d slept for a good four to five hours. God he’d been tired. 

  
“Nico came by when you were asleep,” his roommate informed him. 

  
He groaned. “What did he have to say?” he asked, purely out of politeness. 

  
“Nothing. He just dropped these off.” 

  
Connor pointed at Will’s desk, which was still in disarray, but now had a suspicious pile of not-damaged books in the middle of it. The other ones were gone. A small note on top read Sorry my roommate is a raging dumpster fire and a clusterfuck of terrible ideas in a surprisingly elegant handwriting. He wouldn’t have pegged Nico as a person with pretty handwriting. The word pretty didn’t fit him, but the handwriting, strangely, did. 

  
“He didn’t,” he muttered in disbelief. When he picked them up they were brand new, most recent edition, straight from the campus shop. “Jesus. I can’t take these.”

  
Connor snorted. “Considering the fact that his roommate messed up our room this bad I think you can.”

  
Will shot him a look that was reserved for these specific instances where Connor was spilling morally gray bull. 

  
He held up his hands in defense and shrugged. “He also said that if you didn’t want to keep them you should just look at it like you were borrowing them from a library for an indefinite amount of time.” 

  
Will knew he shouldn’t. But he also needed those textbooks. He chewed the inside of his cheek, mulling over the dilemma.

  
“Solace just take the books, he fucked up good and I promise you he can afford it,” Connor rolled his eyes. “He’s not a martyr but he owns up to his mistakes. Let him.”

  
And Will, begrudgingly, let him. He wasn’t going to go out of his way to thank the guy though. Mostly because he felt like, well, Connor had a point. This was just Nico di Angelo owning up to his mistakes. 

  
Will found that that, too, suited him, just like the way his f curled at the top and the fact that he used the word clusterfuck.   
Not that he would admit that though. 


	3. The Raccoon Aftermath

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Nico looks different than Will imagined up close, Will says some stupid things and Cecil and Lou Ellen are certifiably the worst.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I was going to get everything wrapped up in the last chapter but then my academic year started again and ye goode olden plague times are making it a lot harder and more draining than it needs to be and I haven't had as much time for writing as I would have liked, so I decided to go ahead and post this. The next chapter will wrap everything up. Pinky promise.

Luck would have it that Will was helping out at the on-campus medical centre when Nico decided to come in the next day. Be it good luck or bad luck, Will would leave in the middle for now but this was about the first wholly sensible thing he’d seen the guy do, so he could only applaud it. 

  
“I’m guessing you’re here for a rabies shot,” he said when Nico walked up to the information desk he was manning. 

  
“Don’t you know it,” he said, snapping and pointing finger guns at Will’s chest and Will… kind of melted. As in his anger for the guy in front of him dissipated just a little. He took one look at him and this was probably the first time they had been so close to each other because for the first time he realised how much Nico looked like shit. Not in an unattractive way, mind you, he was still fairly attractive in a rugged, bad boy kind of way. But he looked like he hadn’t slept in a week, was severely anemic from a college diet devoid of any nutritional value, had drunk two gallons of coffee to somehow keep himself upright and was maimed by a raccoon.

  
He could confirm the raccoon bit and had a suspicion at the least of the anemia. 

  
“You might want to get a blood test too,” Will informed him, sliding over a small bundle of administrative papers. 

  
Nico looked at the papers dumbly for a few moments and then back up at Will. “Why?” 

  
Because you look horrible, was probably not a very nice thing to say to the person who’d gotten him new textbooks. And forgot to take the price stickers off of them, mind you, so Will knew exactly how much it had cost him and he wondered if he was some kind of mafia kid or something because it was a lot and he didn’t seem the least bit bothered by it. Otherwise he would likely have brought it up already. At least Will figured he would, but maybe that was just the terrible image he had of the guy speaking. Instead of saying he looked like he’d been run over by a truck though, he gave him a quick once-over and settled on “Because your nails look brittle, your eyes are chalk-white and you look like you’re going to keel over any second now. I want your iron checked. You might be anemic.”

  
Nico smiled a small, crooked smile. “The one time a cute guy checks me out, and then he opens his mouth and tells me I look awful.”

  
Will smiled back and handed him a pen. “You do look awful. Did you even sleep in the past week?”

  
“Well, it is only Wednesday,” Nico just shrugged, and Will wasn’t sure if he was kidding or not, which as a healthcare professional (in training, whatever) scared him just a little bit. Then again it wasn’t his business. He wasn’t the doctor, he was just the guy at the desk who told people to fill out their paperwork because in all seriousness that was the only thing he was qualified to do at this point in his education. Which frankly kind of sucked, because he wished he could force-feed Nico some spinach and tell him he needed to listen because doctor’s orders. Now all he could do was chuckle uncomfortably and tell him he could take a seat in the waiting room and that the doctor would come to fetch him when he was ready.

  
Nico took up the clipboard and the pen and sauntered off but not after giving him a two-fingered mock-salute. The smile was still on his face. Will begrudgingly thought that besides oddly handsome he alse looked kind of cute like that but he decided to ignore it because well… this was Nico. Fire-starting, raccoon-chasing Nico. That was enough to put things into perspective. 

  
He sat back down and spun his chair from side to side for a bit, looking at a misplaced ceiling tile. It was a grating sight and unfortunately he didn’t have anything to get his mind off of it today because it was such a slow day. Besides Nico there was only one other girl filling out her paperwork in the waiting area and before long Nico was back at the desk and handed the filled out forms over neatly. The handwriting was just as surprising as the first time he’d seen it on that note yesterday. Maybe even more so because now there was a scuffed-up guy standing in front of him and he had the prettiest cursive handwriting Will had ever seen in his academic carreer. The dichotomy was jarring. 

  
“Wait, you were born in Venice?” he asked, incredulously when his eyes skipped over the personal information to check it for completeness and also because he couldn’t keep looking at him stupidly. He had a job to do. 

  
Nico looked at him like he was very, very dumb, which was surprisingly not hard with his face scratched up and shadows under his eyes that reached halfway to his cheeks. 

  
“No, I was born in Vicenza,” he said with a sigh, like he was absolutely tired of having to explain this. “Not everything in Italy is Venice or Rome. I know, shocking.”

  
Will ducked his head because, okay, yeah, maybe that was a bit dumb of him but he’d seen Italy and a V so his mind suddenly jumped to conclusions and he hadn’t had the best night’s sleep. Somehow after his five-hour nap he hadn’t been able to go back to sleep again without waking abruptly and seeing phantom wild animals. It was like sleep paralysis demons. Only they were raccoons. 

  
“Well, look at me perpetuating American stereotypes,” he chuckled and yes, there was definitely a hint of embarrassment in there. Maybe more than a hint. He would have apologised or said something even more stupid but at that moment the other girl came back with her forms and he had to turn his attention on her for a bit. Which honestly was quite alright with him. He would have said more, maybe they would have bantered back and forth some more or maybe Will would have been able to talk Nico into eating vegetables, but the girl actually needed proper help and by the time he could get away from the situation Nico was already called back into the office. 

  
It was only when he crashed into bed that night to start his third Sense8 marathon to date that he realised Nico had called him a cute boy.

  
“Why are your ears so red?” Connor asked him when he came back from his late classes.   
Will pulled his pillow closer to his chest. 

  
“Nothing,” he said. His roommate obviously didn’t buy it, but he probably didn’t care either because he just grunted and proceeded to ignore him for the rest of the night. 

  
The one time a cute guy checks me out and then he opens his mouth and tells me I look awful.

* * *

  
He might have approached Nico about it at some point. Just to clear things up, you know? Will was probably reading too much into it anyway and he needed to set himself straight and have a good laugh about it. 

  
Unfortunately Nico chose that exact time to go completely MIA. Will couldn’t help but wonder if it had been because of something he said. Or maybe he’d actually keeled over from taking terrible care of himself and he was in a hospital somewhere getting the care he needed. 

  
He complained about it to Lou Ellen and Cecil at length when they all had their weekly video game battle; a tradition they’d somehow stuck to since their last midterms.

  
“Oh my god,” Lou Ellen said, incredulousness briefly flashing across her face before she started laughing. They were in the common room of Cecil’s corridor, two floors above Will’s and Lou Ellen was beating both of their asses at Mario Kart despite the fact that she was lying upside-down, with her head sticking over the side of the couch. “Will you have such a massive boner for this guy.”

  
He paused the game and looked at her with a slack jaw. Lou Ellen and he had known each other since they were basically in diapers. They had gone to primary school together after kindergarten. They’d been in the same homeroom class throughout most of middle school and high school. Never in his life had he heard her spew such utter bullshit. And that was saying a lot because he had heard some pretty damning things leave that mouth. 

  
“Did you not just hear me explain how he wrecked my dorm room.”

  
“Technically that was his roommate,” she countered, pressing the play button and causing him to promptly drive princess peach off a cliff. 

  
“He disabled a fire alarm!” he shouted, waving and nearly hitting Cecil in the face with his Wii controller. Cecil who at that point was merrily cackling along with her. Will was man enough to admit to himself that he wouldn’t have felt that bad if he’d actually hit the mark. “That’s the most recklessly irresponsible thing I’ve ever heard of! The building could have burned down, people could have gotten hurt! And all that for a silly science experiment I mean come on!” 

  
Cecil was expertly dodging his gesticulating arms while somehow also managing to turn the tide of the race, shelling baby toad and bumping Lou Ellen back into third place. 

  
“Okay but they didn’t. And he gave you those new books,” she kicked at Cecil over Will’s head.

  
“That’s completely beside the point,” Will cried, ducking to avoid her flailing feet. He wasn’t looking for a bloody nose. Not today. “He’s a jackass.”

  
“A jackass you’ve been talking about for the past half hour,” Cecil muttered under his breath. “I’m just saying.”

  
Betrayed by his own friends. A true tragedy. 

  
“Cecil’s right, Willie, just admit that you’re taken with him.” 

  
She pumped her fist in the air and stopped kicking, landing herself at the front of the race again with a big whooping sound. He always felt like apologising to the neighbours whenever she did that which was more often than he would like. 

  
“I’m not,” he said, very much aware that he sounded like a petulant child. He just had to stomp his feet and he’d be a proper toddler. “What kind of rubbish is that? I complain about somebody and they are suddenly my love interest?”

  
Cecil and Lou Ellen shared a look with each other. 

“Of course not,” Cecil said, clearing his throat. 

“Yeah no, why would we think that?” 

Will officially hated his friends. But that was okay. Who needs friends, right? He could be a hermit. Friends were overrated. Especially if those friends were Cecil Markowitz and Lou Ellen Blackstone. Even more especially when both of them lapped him, shelled him and laughed about it the whole time too. 

“Fuck you guys,” he muttered, throwing down his remote. Lou Ellen rolled sideways off the couch so she could kneel in front of him.

“Will,” she said putting a steady hand on his thigh, looking all serious. “It’s perfectly okay to feel physically attracted to somebody you don’t like on a personal level. We’re in college. We’ve all been there.”

Cecil nodded sagely. 

Will swatted Lou Ellen in the face with a pillow as she went down in shrieking laughter. 

“You guys are the worst,” he muttered. “The absolute worst.”

“But you love us,” Cecil hiccuped.

And Will rolled his eyes but of course he did. He just really wondered why sometimes. 


	4. Not So Bad

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (Also informally known as the Nico di Angelo redemption arc)  
> In which Nico gets his sister out of a rough patch, Will gets Lou Ellen out of a rough patch, and in the end there is tequila.

Three weeks, that is the amount of time that Nico di Angelo manages to outrun him. Will is marginally impressed with that because he knows first hand now that that takes at least some kind of effort to avoid a person like that and he hasn’t so much as seen a glimpse of him.

  
That being said he really wished it would have been longer than that considering the fact that the fourth time Will is formally introduced to Nico di Angelo starts of, arguably, even worse than the first one. Which is saying a lot considering the first time included a disabled fire alarm and a fire. In case anybody forgot about that. Which, okay, was something that Will kept bringing up but that didn’t mean it was any less true the hundredth time. 

  
It was Friday, he’d gone to Travis’s stupid basement party because Cecil had dragged him along. And truth be told he was a whole idiot for believing Cecil when he said he wouldn’t ditch him after half an hour. Lou Ellen had come too but she’d disappeared off to God knows where which was slightly worrisome since she was already pretty wasted the last time he’d seen her. Which was half an hour ago. Will had decided in a moment of surprising clarity he better go find her before she woke up in a train station missing her shoes again. Long story.

  
So that was how he found himself in the hallway outside, looking for his friend and wondering why he always picked the weird ones with a penchant for wandering off. It was dark, he had a bottle of water in his hand and the scene in front of him could only be described as incriminating. 

  
There was Nico di Angelo, holding a girl up against the wall by her shoulders and talking to her in a language that Will didn’t understand. Which was already uncool, in and of itself. 

  
Will didn’t not understand whatever he was telling her but she didn’t seem to like it, because she was doing everything in her power short of kicking him in the nuts to get free, yelling at him in the same language. Was that Italian? Was Nico coming onto an Italian exchange student? Will wasn’t sure because it was dark and there was a lot of noise from the basement behind him and he didn’t understand what the argument was about but it looked bad enough for Will to punch the light switch and yell “Hey! Let her go!”

  
Which, as it turned out was precisely the distraction the girl needed to elbow him in the sternum and run past him, back into the basement. 

  
Nico yelled something at her retreating form but she just stuck up a middle finger above her head. He hunched over, supporting himself against the wall with one arm while the other clutched at his chest. 

  
“Cazzo,” he coughed, kicking the wall and gasping for breath for a few moments before fixing Will with a glare that could have killed somebody more faint of heart. 

  
Will was a little bit faint of heart, not going to lie. And with the scabbed over raccoon scratches still showing on his face, he looked really intimidating so he was quite proud of himself when he didn’t run right after the girl.  
“Dude,” Nico said when he was finally breathing a little better. “Not cool.”

  
And Will was struck dumb by an amount of disbelief he really should start getting used to around this guy. 

  
“ _Not cool_?” He took a few steps closer pointed an accusing finger at Nico di Angelo’s nose, who went a little cross-eyed staring at it but didn’t seem wholly perturbed. “You know what’s not cool, buddy? Harassing girls at college parties.”  
“What?” Nico just said. He had the gall to look confused or incredulous or something. Like he had no idea what Will was on about. It was rather infuriating.

  
“I don’t know what you think you were doing but whatever it was, she clearly didn’t want to go with you, so you should’ve just given it a rest and left her in peace,” growled. He just really, seriously couldn’t believe this guy. 

  
This guy in question looked at him dumbly for two whole seconds before he started laughing. And Will was feeling a mixture of things but mostly he just thought _the audacity of this bitch_.

  
“Oh my god, is that what you thought was happening?” he shook his head and pulled his hair loose to make his stupid ponytail again where it had gotten loose in the scuffle. “Fuck, yeah, okay. So. Let me explain that.”

  
Will crossed his arms and regarded him coldly. “Is this going to be the same kind of explanation as when you started a fire for laughs?”

  
“No, because I am an idiot I grant you that, but I sure as hell am not a creep,” he said, slowly, like Will was a child and he needed to be given time to process the words that came at him. He hissed slightly when he raised his arms and pressed a hand against his chest again. 

  
“Fuck I taught her too well,” he muttered under his breath before straightening up and glaring at Will once more with a mild vengeance.

  
Did it make Will a bad person to feel a spike of satisfaction that the dude was in pain? Probably.

  
“What are you doing out here anyway?” Nico asked. His hand was still pressed to his solar plexus in discomfort. Apparently this girl didn’t pull her punches. Which served him quite right. 

  
“Lou Ellen ran off, not that it’s any of your business.”

  
He looked at the ceiling and pushed his tongue into his cheek, thoughtful. 

  
“Short, bright hairdye job, glittery dress?” Nico asked and Will begrudgingly admitted that yep, that was probably Lou Ellen.

“Yeah, she came through here just now, muttering something about piglets, tell you what.” Nico looked down the hallway in both directions.

  
“You help me look for my sister and I help you find your friend.”

  
Will’s brain momentarily short-circuited. 

  
“Wait your sister?” he asked, incredulously. “That girl just now was your sister?” 

  
That certainly explained why she hadn’t straight-up kneed him in the crotch. He wouldn’t do that to his brothers either. He hoped Kayla had the basic decency to keep that move out of sibling fights as well. 

“Twin sister,” Nico said matter-of-factly. “So if she starts telling you that I’m her little brother I just want to say that the age difference is less than an hour and she’s full of shit.”

“Oh so you are alike,” he mumbled under his breath. He didn’t know where it was coming from but Nico stared at him in shocked silence for a second or two before he started laughing. A light-hearted, earnest thing. It was quite breathtaking. Or it would be if he didn’t have a messed up face. Because of raccoon maiming. That actually should have healed up by now. Which told Will that Nico was one of those people that picked at scabs and he should probably chastise him for that at some point.

And also the laugh would have been nicer if the lighting had been any better. Now he mainly looked kind of loony. Which may or may not fit Nico’s aesthetic better than a sweet tinkling laugh might have but Will digressed. 

“You do have a sense of humour,” Nico said when he was done, but he quickly sobered up again and pointed at the basement door behind Will. “We should really find her though. Short rundown: she’s been knocking back unmixed tequila like a madwoman and she has diabetes. She needs to regulate before she gets a hypo because she’s so drunk she won’t notice if she does. Because she’s a dumbass like that.”

That got Will to full attention again because Nico was right and this was a medical emergency. She needed to get her blood sugar checked. Probably eat a cracker as well. 

“Oh my god, yeah, that does sound like something a sister of yours would do,” Will muttered, gaining another look™ before they both dove headfirst into the chaos of the party again. 

Finding the second di Angelo wasn’t as hard as finding her brother was, it appeared. You just had to follow the commotion and the angry Italian cursing. 

“Fuck,” Nico said, ever helpful, when they shoved through the throng of cheering people to reveal a fight on the verge of escalating into physical violence. On one side was Bryce Lawrence, the meanest piece of work Will had seen around campus. He was built like a linebacker and his nose was still crooked from the last time somebody had broken it. On the other side was Nico’s sister. Will had to hand it to the di Angelo twins: they had a gift for being there when situations went sideways. 

“She ran off two minutes ago how did she already pick a fight?” He had to yell to be heard over the music and the chanting mass egging on the two people yelling at each other. 

Nico shook his head. “Innate di Angelo power.” 

What surprised him was that he didn’t really look all that bothered by the situation in front of him, like he figured his sister could take this man which was a scary thought because she looked like a twig and twigs usually didn’t win fights from rock slides. Instead he smiled wrily and stepped into the circle. 

Will was just about to get really scared for Nico and his sister both when a flash of blond hair raced into the circle and judo flipped Bryce Lawrence into oblivion. 

“Ohhh, double fuck,” cried Nico, now halfway to the centre and Will scrambled to catch up to him, feeling extremely self-conscious with all eyes trained on him. Well, not him personally, but it felt that way. 

“Annabeth you really didn’t have to,” he heard Nico tell the blond girl, while Will walked over to a fuming Italian lady who was yelling at Bryce to “stay down you pile shit.”

He knew enough about Annabeth Chase to know that he didn’t want to be part of the conversation when she looked at somebody the way she looked at Nico in that moment, so he figured he might as well get the medical emergency squared away while the both of them did… whatever. He didn’t care. He told himself he didn’t care. If he repeated it enough times he would believe it himself.

He just heard her say “I have a bone to pick with you” come out of her mouth when he laid a calm hand on the other girl’s shoulder. She flinched but at the same time she didn’t throw him down so he figured that was a good sign. 

“Hey,” he said as softly as he could while still being audible over the noise of the party. “I think you should come out with me for a bit.”

She rolled her eyes at him and threw her brother a stink-eye. Which Nico didn’t notice because he was too deep in a conversation Will couldn’t hear from where he was standing. Maybe it was about the fire alarm thing. That would make sense. Annabeth was an RA, after all, even if it wasn’t on their floor. 

“Can we just step outside? Just to talk.” Will asked her with his most charming smile, the one that made all the nurses at work give him the good shift at the front desk when he asked for it. 

Female Nico shot a look up to the heavens but steered him back into the hallway nonetheless. 

“If you’re here to tell me that I should be a good girl and report the dude from before I’m just going to stop you right there and tell you that that dude was just my very naggy brother and you need to keep your nose out of other people’s business,” she started before Will even had the chance to ask her to sit down so he could do a finger prick. 

She was in no condition to do it herself, Will decided, because she was a lot drunker than she looked at first glance. Her speech was slurred and Will noticed the way she swayed slightly on her feet and practically hugged the wall to stay upright. He had to grab her elbow to prevent her from face-planting on the stairs. In summary she really needed to go home and take a long, long nap, diabetic or no. This girl shouldn’t be left out.

“So are we done here?” she said when he didn’t immediately respond, trying clumsily to shove his hand off rather ungracefully. All she managed to do was tripping a step back. 

“Actually your very naggy brother asked me to help take care of you. I’m pre med. Your liver is not making any sugars right now, you need a cracker. Or like a full fat soda even. Check your blood sugar.”  
Will calmly took her elbow again and led her out of the way from the door. Will made her sit down against the wall. 

“For fuck’s sake, Nico,” she muttered at the heavens, but she didn’t struggle against him, and indeed unclasped a little pouch from around her waist. 

“Do your worst pre med,” she said in a tone that he could perfectly imagine her brother using. They were definitely brother and sister. When Will had dubbed her female Nico he hadn’t known how right he had been to do so. Aside from the obvious anatomical differences and the lack of tattoos, this girl could pass for Nico di Angelo no problem.

“So what’s your name?” he asked, bringing out her blood sugar meter and a clean test strip. 

At first she looked at him like he was a nutjob (which, considering the company he had been keeping lately he considered fair) but then she sighed and evidently decided she’d humor him. 

“Bianca,” she said. 

Bianca di Angelo. It was a soft name. It fit her. Until she opened her mouth and started lobbing choice words in Italian over Will’s head. Nico had arrived again. 

“You did not have it handled,” Nico replied to whatever she was saying in English, probably for Will’s benefit. “If Annabeth hadn’t been there you would have been in an ambulance by now.”

She held out her hand so Will could prick her with the lancet, holding her hand surprisingly steady for an arguing person with impressive blood alcohol levels. 

“Or you would have been suspended for real this time,” she countered. “For breaking his nose again.”

Will tried really hard to ignore the conversation happening and just squeeze a drop of blood on the test strip. For the nth time he wondered how he’d even gotten mixed up with this guy in the first place. 

Rotten luck, probably. 

“Okay, not to break up this lovely conversation,” he said when the meter showed a mildly alarming number. “But either your meter is off or it just gave me a legitimate 3.9.”

That silenced the siblings, even if it was just for a second before they started arguing again.

“Right,” he muttered. “I’m going to get you some crackers.”

He was more than glad for the opportunity to escape, even if it was to scour the kitchen for some non-alcoholic drinks and crackers. 

When he got back, things had calmed down mostly as well, possibly because Bianca’s head was lolled to the side and she looked like she was going to pass out from either exhaustion, drunkenness or low blood sugar any second now. 

“Here you go,” he said, pushing a half litre bottle of Sprite into her hand. She unscrewed the cap and took slow sips. 

“I’m taking her up to her room and then we can go look for your friend,” Nico told him when she was done and Bianca was struggling to pull herself to her feet. It seemed that she was done with protesting, so either she just wanted to go to bed now or Nico had made a compelling case. Will’s implicit bias led him to believe that the former was more likely to be the case. 

“Okay,” he agreed, nevertheless. “Are you going to be okay getting her to her room by yourself?”

Nico rolled his eyes at him. He slung one of Bianca’s arms around his neck to support most of her weight. 

“Please, Solace,” he snorted. Haughtily. “I do this at least once a month. Though the assistance is appreciated.”

* * *

  
Their quest for Lou Ellen was more of a challenge. Mainly because they didn’t have any idea where to start. 

His first order of business was to call Cecil, since he was likely the last person to talk to her but that conversation went something like this:

“Hey have you seen Lou?”

“I thought she was with you. Oh, Will, Will, Lou, you, that rhymes!” he needed a good forty five seconds to get over his laughter. “But yeah no, she ran off to somewhere.”

“You’re being supremely unhelpful.”

“Yeah… but I’m fire at beer pong right now. Anyway I hope you find her, bye.”

“Cecil!”

And then there was the ominous beeping sound of a cut line. He sighed deeply, posing the very rhetorical question “what did I even expect.”

“Probably more of a lead,” Nico helpfully supplied anyway. He felt like strangling Nico. At least that was a familiar feeling by now. Give it another month and he’d start finding it comforting. 

Two hours and a sore throat later they found her passed out on the fountain in front of the science building, cradling a — surprisingly — mostly full bottle of tequila like a plush toy. One of her shoes was floating in the basin, which was arguably the worst part of the whole evening. Now Will had to get half of his trousers wet to get it out. He also nearly dropped his phone.

At least she was easy enough to get into bed after realising that it wasn’t a mugger that was shaking her shoulder. She did nail him with a solid backhand, though, before giggling out an apology and grabbing onto Will’s sleeve all the way to her room. 

“So,” Nico said, when she was finally snoring away in her own bed. “It’s pretty late, do you want to call it a night?”

Will was tempted to say yes, he felt bone tired. But his body was still buzzing with way too much adrenalin to be able to sleep a wink. And then Nico produced Lou Ellen’s teddy bear bottle from behind his back and suggested with a shrug that if he wasn’t going to sleep then they might as well have their own party because they missed the one in the basement. 

Will didn’t know what possessed him to take up the offer but he shrugged and that’s how he found himself with his back against the bricks of their dorm building and Nico chattering away about the times he’d hauled Leo’s or Bianca’s ass out of rough situations of her own making. (Mostly Leo’s though.)

“You’re a lot more responsible than you look aren’t you?” Will said and he realised it was strangely true at the same time he said it in a sudden bout of inner clarity. 

Nico snorted and took a drag of a cigarette. 

“More like I am generally responsible but I just have the shittest luck on the planet and terrible idiots gravitate towards me,” he said, blowing a cloud of smoke into the late November air. “So I’m always at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

He handed the bottle to him and Will took a ginger sip. Public service announcement: tequila tastes quite terrible. If you have any other options that are not vodka, go for the other option. Will made a face when it burned down his throat and lingered in his nose for some reason.

“That’s rich coming from the guy who disabled a fire alarm for an unhinged science experiment,” he said with a little cough.   
Nico inclined his head and made a gesture with his hand indicating okay, touché, he had a point there. 

“Yet I still stand by that shit luck,” he said. “My mother says that I was born under unlucky stars.”

It was Will’s turn to snort and then Nico tilted his head to the side and narrowed his eyes, as if something dawned on him just then. 

“Motherfucker,” he muttered breathlessly, eyes widening comically. “I’m born under the same stars as Bianca and she’s fine my mom has been spewing utter bullshit for years.”

And it was funny. It was all goddamn funny and Will knew that he was getting drunk because the stars started to look a lot brighter than they were supposed to in the middle of town. But Nico di Angelo was a great drunken partner, indignant and just the right amount of irresponsible to pass the bottle to him when they should both probably stop but at the same time responsible enough to hold it up against the streetlight after a while and say that: “Fuck, we really need to lay off now, we’ve had way too much. This is going to wreck us.”

He screwed the cap back on and tossed it to the side so they couldn’t reach it anymore, all the while making little sarcastic comments with a lopsided smile on his face. 

Will laughed himself to stitches for the first time in ages with Nico, at half past five in the morning on the dry patch of grass in front of their dorm building. A cigarette hung between Nico’s relaxed fingers, his head was thrown back against the bare brick wall while his nose scrunched up and his eyes sparkled in the orange streetlight. And just then, Will had a crazy thought. One that probably had to do with the bottle of tequila that was in the grass between them. 

But right then and there he looked at the man and realised that maybe pretty suited Nico di Angelo after all. It suited him very much. 

And if they were going to wake up the next morning with their faces leaned against cold concrete then that was nobody’s business. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was supposed to be a 5k oneshot but it got away from me so badly wow.   
> Anyway, I hope you enjoyed reading this. I have some more things lined up for this AU that I will post when I post it. (Such as the hunt for Lou Ellen, which I feel I have not done proper justice here. But alas, school is a cruel mistress and otherwise it would have taken me another two weeks to finish this I'm afraid.)
> 
> Anyway thank you for all your lovely comments and kudos, they mean the world! Thank you for sticking with me so far. Until next time!

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked this story, then let me know if you would be interested in reading more silly things set in this AU. I have a bunch of ideas that I could work with here, so I'm thinking of turning them into a series of oneshots maybe.


End file.
